


the hanged man & the emperor

by oogaboogu



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Video Game World, Angst, Canonical Character Death, City of Light (The 100), Drug Use, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Mild Gore, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, graphic description of drowning, im terrible at tagging we know this, kind of?, or more accurately allies to enemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:14:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29164026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oogaboogu/pseuds/oogaboogu
Summary: MAJOR ARCANA - THE HANGED MAN & THE EMPEROR:Sometimes a feeling of failure or being played false. More often the delegation of power. The moment of action when events pass beyond control and either go as planned or not.Murphy doesn't give a crap about Arcana, the virtual reality game that has swept Polis. He's mellowed out in his old age (23, but whatever) — he goes to work, comes home, doesn't text his ex-girlfriend, stays out of trouble, rinse and repeat. That is, until a favour for a friend goes wrong and he accidentally uploads himself into the game with no way out other than to play. In an attempt to survive, Murphy enters into a tentative partnership with self-proclaimed king of Arcana, Bellamy Blake. Only in this game, it's kill or be killed, and Murphy isn't stupid enough to think his alliance with Bellamy will last...
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/John Murphy, past Clarke Griffin/Lexa - Relationship, past Octavia Blake/Lincoln
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	the hanged man & the emperor

**Author's Note:**

> i know absolutely nothing about computers, coding, video games, or anything at all science-y described in this fic *finger guns* i tried googling some coding terms and the explanations made my peanut brain short-circuit, so i just threw 'em in willy-nilly. i am also not a tarot expert, i just think the cards are cool. please please grant me your suspension of disbelief and a hefty, hefty dose of creative license thank u
> 
> i have committed some counts of robbery from a japanese show on netflix called "alice in borderland", and also from ts eliot's "the waste land". i only robbed the general shape of the 100's city of light. warning in advance for lots of violence, graphic description of drowning, description of a fatal car accident, and one instance of party drug use, the effects of which are described in detail

_Why does tragedy exist?_

_Because you are full of rage._

_Why are you full of rage?_

_Because you are full of grief._

— Anne Carson, from _Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides_

**\--LEVEL 0--**

**_TUTORIAL: UNREAL CITY_ **

The last thing Murphy thinks before his consciousness is swallowed by code is that none of this would have happened if he hadn’t saved Jasper Jordan from death by brick.

So much for goddamn karma.

_—01000100100110—_

“I will pay you one hundred dollars,” Jasper says. He’s holding his hard hat in his hands instead of on his head — where legally it ought to stay at all times — and he’s still wearing those ridiculous goggles. He has not, as of yet, lit his roll-up, nor has he requested the use of Murphy’s lighter to do so. Unless Jasper has become the kind of person who remembers his own lighter overnight, Murphy suspects that he hasn’t actually come out with him to the back of the site for a smoke at all.

Murphy fixes Jasper with his most loathsome sneer in the hope that it’ll deter his coworker the same way it deters friendly neighbours, would-be muggers, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. It doesn’t work, of course. Jasper Jordan is the sort to try and hug a rattlesnake. Every day, Murphy regrets saving his life. “Put your hat on, Jordan.”

“It’s _literally_ just sitting there for an hour, max two, and keeping a look out. Our usual guy can’t make it and we just need to be sure we won’t be interrupted—“

“Jasper, nobody cares what you and your little boyfriend get up to in your free time, least of all me. Besides, you obviously do not have a hundred dollars.” Murphy nods toward Jasper's hand-rolled cigarette, before taking a deep drag of his own, feeling the warmth settle in his chest and still the shake he seems to always have in his hands. He needs to quit, and probably would have already, only for the fact he dreads the thought of losing the right to his blessed five-minute cigarette breaks. Murphy hates to be negative, but in his estimation, having to endure an entire eight-hour shift with no interruptions is barely shy of the ninth circle of hell.

“I absolutely do have a hundred dollars.” Jasper sounds affronted. He still hasn’t put his hat on. If another brick decides to take a tumble his direction, Murphy is just going to stand back and let it smash his skull in. “And besides, people _do_ care what we’ve been getting up to — and it's really, really, the wrong sort of people.”

Murphy wonders when he lost his touch. Maybe turning twenty-three had finally banished all remaining vestiges of the menacing aura he’d mastered during his teenaged years, and now people think him approachable. Or, more likely, he saved one idiot from being brained by a falling brick, and now said idiot thinks he can ask him for a favour. As if Murphy tugging his second least favourite coworker out of the way and taking the deadly blow to his own (steel) toe instead of letting it crack Jasper’s stupid head open had made the two of them _friends._

“Jasper,” he says, with his nicest smile, “go away.”

“Come on, Murphy. _Two_ hundred dollars. An hour’s work. You just have to wait in the foyer and make sure nobody who looks suspicious comes in. Easy money!”

Murphy sighs. “Are you and Marty growing weed or cooking meth?”

“Monty.”

“What?”

“His name’s Monty, not Marty. And it’s not that. Please Murphy, you’d be doing me a major solid.”

Jasper used to be afraid of Murphy. Murphy’s been working in construction since he dropped out of high school at seventeen, and by virtue of his mean look and even meaner attitude, was made junior supervisor at twenty. For an extra one-dollar-fifty an hour, he gets to yell at people as well as lay brick: truly the stuff dreams are made of. He used to yell at Jasper twice as much as he yelled at everybody else, for a whole wealth of offences ranging from health and safety violations (he never wears his goddamn hard hat — see aforementioned falling brick incident); to making a nuisance of himself (Jasper is not an architect, nor had the clients _requested_ a zig-zag wall for their office block); to just being really, really annoying as a person.

“One moment,” Murphy says, lowering his cigarette and ducking under the scaffolding. “DICKSON, ARE YOU BEING PAID TO SIT ON YOUR ASS AND LOOK PRETTY? BACK TO WORK BEFORE I SHOVE YOUR HEAD SO FAR UP THE CEMENT MIXER THEY'LL INSTALL IT IN THE MET!”

Once Dickson’s phone is stowed back in his perilously low rear pocket, asscrack on view to the city as standard, Murphy turns back to Jasper.

“Well?” Jasper looks hopeful. Murphy can’t imagine why.

Another drag of blessed tar and nicotine and god-knows-what-else; a small, dark part of Murphy hopes it kills him sooner rather than later, thus freeing him from the yoke of having friends who ask him for favours. “Two hundred and fifty. And you have to promise never to ask me for anything ever again.”

Jasper’s face immediately splits into a grin.

“Don’t you dare hug me,” Murphy warns.

“Oh, thank _you_ Murphy — you’re a lifesaver — literally — well, actually literally, since that time with the brick — thank you so much! I swear this is the last thing I will ever ask you. Oh, thank you so much!”

“Yeah, yeah. Give me the details later, I gotta make sure Dickson isn’t putting asbestos in my locker.” Murphy crushes the butt of his cigarette with his toe, and turns to leave.

“Wait!”

He sighs, long-suffering. “What, Jordan?”

“Can I, uh, borrow your lighter?”

_—01000100100110—_

Murphy opens his eyes. It takes him a moment to adjust — he feels strangely light, like gravity has lessened, like he’s been rendered a little less anchored, a little more loose from the earth. Like he’s half-ghost.

Then he sees the menu. Words hover in the dark.

**_-START- -QUIT-_ **

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” he says.

It takes him a minute to remember how he got here, like the information is buffering before it loads. Then, it all comes rushing back at once, a flurry of sound and image that has his brain scrambling to keep up.

_—01000100100110—_

It turns out that Jasper Jordan and Monty Green are not, in fact, cooking meth in their apartment. They are hacking into the Arcana servers, which is twice as illegal and not half as lucrative. Murphy doesn’t much see the point in crime when you aren’t even making money from it. Apparently, it’s the principle of the thing.

“Have I told you,” Murphy says, leaning halfway into the apartment, the frame of the window cutting uncomfortably into his belly where his shirt has ridden up, “that I would prefer you were cooking meth?”

“Yes,” snaps Monty, handing Murphy the bag of tech, “you’ve mentioned that.”

Another harsh bang on the door of the apartment. “ _OPEN UP! WE HAVE A WARRANT!”_ one of the police officers yells. Murphy knows they have a warrant; he saw them with it only five minutes earlier, in the apartment building's grim little foyer where he had been sitting in peace, having been assured two hundred dollars in exchange for an hour spent in boredom next to the empty fish tank.

Jasper cringes, hands in his hair, turning in a circle in his own messy living room. “I think that’s everything, Monty,” he whispers.

The door rattles in its hinges; they’re gonna break it down, Murphy’s sure of it. And he wants to be nowhere near the scene of the heinous digital crime when it does.

“Make sure you plug it in as soon as you get home,” Monty hisses. “And don’t touch anything — the programme is pre-calibrated for upload!”

None of those words make any sense to Murphy, but he doesn’t wait around for the layman’s explanation; he’s out of the window and hurrying down the steps of the fire escape before Monty can bark another order at him, the most illegal laptop computer in the whole of Polis safely stowed in his backpack.

As a general rule, he’s stayed out of trouble with the law since those couple counts of arson during his teenage years, having outgrown two thirds of his existential angst, and also realising that the excuse of being an orphan shuffled from foster home to foster home is much less convincing when you’re twenty-three than it is when you’re thirteen. Leave it to Jasper Jordan to drag Murphy into _all_ of his messes, as if having to suffer through eight hours of his company Monday to Friday wasn't hellish enough. He should never have taken the junior supervisor post and continued to build his little walls in peace, free as a bird, nary a single responsibility to darken his days. At the very least, _his_ job wouldn’t have been the one on the line when some fool forgoes his hard hat and steps into the path of a falling object — never mind the job loss inevitable if and when it comes to light he aided and abetted in major digital fraud, no matter the fact he hadn’t known he was doing it. Truthfully, if it hadn’t been for Monty’s threat to expose Murphy’s part, however minor, in the whole hacking-into-Arcana-servers thing had he refused to take the tech and run, he would have been out of there at the first sight of trouble. He can hardly beg for leniency in court by telling them he had "thought they were only cooking meth, your honour!"

He takes the bus home, sitting with the backpack on his lap. It starts to rain; condensation drips down the window, robbing the coloured lights of Polis that shine through the glass of all focus and definition. Murphy tries in vain to quell the panicky fluttering in the region of his bellybutton by dwelling on the fact that if he let Jasper die, he wouldn’t be in this situation.

A little voice at the back of his head pipes up with: _instead, you’d have spent your Friday night at home. Doing nothing, seeing no one._

Murphy ignores it, because being mad at Jasper is much more satisfying than dwelling on the fact that he wouldn’t have done anything with his evening anyway. That’s another thing that’s harder when you’re twenty-three than when you’re thirteen. Murphy might have jeered and snarked and bullied his way through school, but he always had lackeys to back him up and bounce insults off. Now, he just has an ex-girlfriend who never calls him back, Jasper Jordan borrowing his lighter and landing him in danger of arrest, and the daily threat of Dickson putting worms in his lunch, even if Dickson values his job too much to ever make good on it.

Paranoia has him getting off the bus two stops after his own. He’s glad the rain gives him the excuse to lift his hood. It’s pointless, of course, since every citizen in Polis is chipped, but it makes him feel marginally better about the fact he’s smuggling what is probably a couple thousand dollars’ worth of extremely dangerous tech that he doesn’t fully understand into his shitty one-bedroom apartment. It does mean he gets soaked on the way home though — so soaked that he takes a shower the minute he gets in the door, and forgets entirely about Monty’s order to turn on the laptop as soon as possible.

He doesn’t feel bad about it in the slightest. Still dripping from his shower, he takes the (slightly damp from being carried home in a non-waterproof backpack, but he isn’t gonna fret over it) laptop out of its sleeve, and crouches in his sweats in front of the power outlet he usually has his TV plugged into. For all that what Jasper and Monty were doing was highly illegal and very technical, they have barely any equipment. Just the laptop, some sort of modified modem-looking thing, a black box that whirrs when turned on and that Murphy could not name even if there was a gun to his head, and the standard Arcana USB port.

Fortunately — or possibly unfortunately, Murphy hasn’t made his mind up — the laptop turns on. There is a lot of code on the screen, which means absolutely nothing to Murphy, so he leaves the laptop to its nefarious business while towelling his hair dry, draping himself in a blanket, and fixing himself a bottle of beer and a bowl of the sugariest cereal he’s got as a well-deserved treat after the most stressful evening he’s had since next door lost their pet tarantula and it turned up in his shower. The combination makes him nauseous, so after just a couple of bites he throws out the rest of the cereal.

A text from Jasper lights up his phone. He takes that to mean neither he nor Monty have been arrested/imprisoned without bail/sentenced to execution, and so happily ignores it.

The faint blue light of the laptop screen is oddly mesmerising. Murphy sits on his couch with his beer and watches the 0s and the 1s scroll in their indecipherable patterns across the screen, hypnotic in the same way an open fire is; soothing something primal and instinctive within him. The long-healed microchip injection site at the back of his neck itches.

He finishes his beer.

The laptop is done booting up, or whatever the technical term is for what it was doing. One window opens on the Arcana homepage — or, at least, Murphy thinks it’s the Arcana homepage. He’s never been much of a gamer, and besides, Arcana is a game for the very rich, or people desperate enough to take a risk and delusional enough to think it’ll pay off. Murphy is neither rich nor delusional, and so he has ignored the Arcana craze, preferring instead to sit in his apartment after work and watch TV, and maybe, if he wants a treat at the weekend, try and replicate one of the recipes he saw on MasterChef.

It’s never as fun eating it alone.

Maybe he should text Emori again. She can’t ignore him forever.

He doesn’t quite know what happens then — the laptop seems to glitch a little, a blue light flickering across the screen — and it’s running some odd electrical interference with the chip at the base of his skull — nothing worse than the sharp zap of static when he touches the metal of the trolley in the supermarket, but still _annoying_ — so he crouches down to tap the spacebar key — he’s no IT expert, but he might as well try do something — forgetting entirely about Monty’s earlier warning not to touch anything. It’s just the spacebar; he’s hardly going to rewrite the program by tapping a single key.

There’s the high-pitched whistle of tinnitus in his ears before he realises what he’s done. A sick twist behind his navel, and the overwhelming sensation of motion sickness. His shitty one-bedroom apartment, the peeling wallpaper and the plugged-out TV, all pitch to the side. His vision flickers before blinking out.

“Fuck,” he tries to say, but his voice is lost to the machine.

_—01000100100110—_

Murphy is still staring in dismay at the floating words when a voice — female, kind of wry, unsettlingly disembodied and sounding out of thin air — cuts through the scrambled soup of his thoughts, jerking him back to attention.

“Jasper? Or Monty?”

He turns in place, but — aside from the greenish glow of the words — the space he is in is dark and empty, extending seemingly forever with no visible end or beginning. He is neither warm nor cold, neither full nor hungry, neither tired nor buzzed. It is the most basic and functional state of being he can imagine, and the prevailing feeling of numb comfort is so thorough that the sensations of having needs unmet — hunger, cold, thirst, pain — are all suddenly hard to remember, like the very knowledge of them is being overwritten where he stands.

“Who are you?” he asks, suspiciously, wondering if he’s a crazy person who imagined the voice. Though, truthfully, he isn’t convinced he’s capable of coming up with something like this. Murphy’s never been one of those people who has crazy dreams — his are more of the showed-up-to-work-with-no-pants-on, or dad-in-the-car-dead-on-impact, or tarantula-in-the-shower-again variety. Even if he didn’t distinctly remember the sequence of events that led him to this, he thinks he would be inclined to believe its veracity.

He realises then that he is genuinely after accidentally uploading himself into the Arcana cloud. “Fuck,” he says, again, but with feeling.

It occurs to Murphy that all of this is happening inside of his own head; the chip he’s ignored since the day a gloved nurse inserted it suddenly working overtime. Maybe he can just _think_ himself out of it, and back into his beloved apartment, where there are no disembodied voices and he can be sure of what it feels like to need to pee. Screwing his eyes shut, he rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, and imagines that he’s home; back with the cracked faux-leather of the sofa, the scratchy blanket he’d draped himself in, the precise notes of the faint smell of mildew in the kitchen that isn’t quite bad enough to get the landlord involved.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s still in the dark room.

“Damn it,” he grumbles. “Do I need to click my heels together three times, or what?”

It’s rhetorical, obviously, but the disembodied voice draws in a breath. “I take it that you are _not_ Monty or Jasper?”

Murphy scoffs. “I’m gonna kill them. Are you a friend of their’s? Can you pass along that message? That I’m gonna kill them? Because I don’t know about you, but uploading my consciousness to an empty room with the world’s most sinister looking title screen is _not_ what I had been planning to do with my Friday night!”

“Oooookay,” says the woman’s voice. “I see there has been a misunderstanding. My name is Raven, and I’m a programmer on Arcana. Will you please select the _START_ option for me? I’ll be able to talk to you properly in-game, and besides, the whole thing’s already been calibrated along the necessary functions for launch, so there’s no point in wasting the file.”

Murphy zones out the minute he hears the computer-y terms. Since he clearly can’t think himself out of the game, he figures that there’s nothing else for it. With the vaguest notion of trepidation, muted and almost foreign, he walks — a little unsteady at first, though he soon adjusts to the slight difference in gravity — up to the floating letters that spell out _START._

“So, do I just..?” He begins to say, but has already reached out to touch the letters before Raven can answer him.

They’re warm to the touch, and they turn traffic-light-red upon contact.

Immediately the dark room disintegrates like ashes caught by the breeze. He catches a glimpse of strings and strings of code, before his vision fills with white light and an unsettling buzzing sound overtakes his hearing, crowding all other thoughts out.

If he were ever asked to imagine what a mind-wipe would feel like, this is what he would answer. For a time he cannot measure, light and sound is all he is. There isn’t even space left within him to be afraid.

_—01000100100110—_

Murphy opens his eyes.

He stands in what looks to be the basement of a multi-storey parking lot. It’s raining outside, with only the barest hints of grey, overcast daylight leaching in the narrow strips of windows set into the upper edge of the walls. Water drips from a loose screw in the steel beam overhead, puddling on the concrete, and he can hear the distant sounds of traffic filtering in alongside the pitter-patter of rain. In a stark contrast to the dark room Murphy was just in, this basement is damp and chilly, and he shoves his hand into his pockets to warm them.

He notes two things. The first is that he’s now wearing dark jeans, instead of the sweats he’d put on after his shower, and second is that there is something in his left hand pocket. It feels like reinforced or laminated paper. He’s about to take it out for a closer look before a voice sounds from directly behind him and nearly gives him a heart attack.

“That’ll be your card,” she says.

He spins in place, and finds himself face to face with a girl in a red jacket, smirking at him. Her hair is tied in a high ponytail, and she is so pretty he is capable only of gaping at her for a moment — though to be fair, shock may also be a contributing factor.

“…What?” he finally manages.

“Your card,” she says, impatiently. “You do know how Arcana works, right? They haven’t sent me a complete dumbass?”

“They?”

“Monty and Jasper. I’m Raven, if it wasn’t already obvious.”

“Oh,” he says. Then, “How do you know Monty and Jasper?”

She pulls a face. “Complete dumbass. Okay. Great.”

He rubs his nose with the back of his knuckle, and tries not to bristle at her comment. “Listen, I may not know exactly what shit those two were up to with the servers, but it had the PPD breaking down their door with a search warrant. I didn’t _have_ to take the damn computer, but I did, and this is the thanks I get?”

Her face falls. “Shit, the police were after them?”

“That’s what I said,” he snaps.

She glares at him, unamused. “So you took the computer. Mind explaining how you ended up in the game, then? Because neither Monty nor Jasper mentioned you tagging along.”

“I was covering for their usual guy,” Murphy says, suddenly feeling very weary. Waiting by the empty fish tank in Jasper’s apartment building foyer already feels like it happened an age ago. “Didn’t know I was gonna end up smuggling the laptop home, but whatever, just being a good friend. It started glitching about an hour after I plugged it in, and whatever it was doing had my chip buzzing in my head, so I pressed one of the keys in the hope it’d stop it. I didn’t exactly plan on ending up _here.”_ He knows he’s pouting, but it’s hard to stop. “I don’t know a damn thing about computers.”

“Yeah,” Raven says drily, “I can tell.”

He glowers at her. Usually, people are intimidated by his glower. Not Raven. She just smiles serenely up at him, taking some sort of sick and twisted enjoyment out of his distress.

“Okay. I’ve had enough,” he announces, looking around the deserted parking lot. “How do I get out?”

She shrugs. “You die.”

He blinks. “What?”

“Them’s the rules. Either you die, or you claim a save point. As you need at least seven more cards to be allowed to claim a save point, your only option right now is to die. Which would be an awful waste of ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand dollars,” he repeats, feeling light-headed. He knew Arcana was a rich man’s game, but that just seems excessive. “Whose ten thousand dollars?”

“Monty and Jasper scraped it together between them, I think,” she says. “They might have taken out a loan.”

“And I—”

“And you used it.”

Murphy stares at her. “I pressed the _spacebar.”_

“An expensive spacebar to press.” She looks at him steadily. “You know, neither of them were much good during the simulations I programmed for them. Barely managed to get four cards between them. Maybe you’ll be better.”

Murphy is still a little caught up on the whole _ten thousand dollars_ thing, but not so much that he doesn’t catch on to what she’s suggesting. “Are you saying I should _play?”_

“You’re already in the game, dumbass. Either you play or you die.”

He needs a moment to process that. “I pressed the spacebar,” he says, again, as if that’ll make a difference, because all he did was hit the goddamned spacebar, and that was all it took to boot up the game, and drag him into it. He remembers the way the glitching computer had interfered with his own chip, and inwardly curses. Whatever caused the mix-up hardly matters now, not when he’s stuck in the Arcana’s so-called City of Light, with a ten thousand dollar tab and exactly one way out.

“Suck it up,” she says, cheerily. “Just think, you’re getting to help me take down the government!”

“What?”

“That glitch you mentioned,” she says, leaning forward a little, and poking him gently in the centre of his chest, directly over his heart, “is right here. Have you ever heard of a Trojan horse?”

“I know even less about horses than I do about computers.”

She just stares at him for a second, mouth open a little, as though flabbergasted. He doesn’t have the foggiest idea why. “Jesus. Anyway, a Trojan horse is a kind of virus. It basically disguises itself as a harmless application or program in order to get access to the system that it then attacks or steals information from. In this instance, you’re the Trojan horse.”

“And this will help you take down the government how?”

She moves to lean against one of the steel pillars, tucking her hands under her armpits. There’s a steely sort of glint in her eye as she speaks. “You don’t have to worry about that. In fact, probably the less you know the better. All that’s relevant to you is that while you play the game, you’re enabling me to collect information on how it works.”

“So you’re just using me?”

“You’re playing a video game,” she says sarcastically, “not sacrificing your life to the coding gods. It’s just reconnaissance. Maybe a little data-scrambling. You’re the wooden horse, not the Greek army; you literally won’t even know you’re doing it.”

“Stop acting like I’ve already agreed to this! I haven’t agreed to it!”

She smiles thinly at him from her spot next to the steel beam, calling his bluff with only an incline of her head. He ignores her in favour of shoving his hands back into his pockets, where his tarot card still sits, forgotten. It’s barely the size of his mobile phone. Turning his back to Raven, he takes it out, and turns it over, out of a need for distraction as much as out of curiosity.

It’s number XII. The Hanged Man.

And, with a dizzy swoop of panic, Murphy realises it’s _him_ in the card, suspended upside down by the ankle, his other foot bent at an angle out from his body, his hands tied behind his back. He’s even dressed the same, with the dark jeans and the same red patch on the shoulder of his jacket. The dark locks of hair that stand on end with gravity match his own in shade and texture. The hanged man’s face is calm, almost serene — and it bears a terrifying likeness to his own.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a game, and they've just filled in the card template with his details. It can't mean anything.

Hands trembling a little, Murphy turns the card over to examine the back, where he figures he might find more of an explanation as to what the damn thing is meant to symbolise, because right now, he isn’t feeling particularly positive about it.

 _SURRENDER_ is written on the bottom. On the opposite edge, the word is upside down. He reverses the card, so that the hanged man is the right way up. _SACRIFICE._

He blinks, and the meanings have shifted. _SURRENDER_ has become _SCAPEGOAT. SACRIFICE_ now reads _MARTYR._

Murphy’s stomach tightens with unease. He can’t drag his eyes away from his own blissful expression in the card, as though there’s no place his painted counterpart would rather be than dangling upside-down from what looks like the iron bar of a streetlamp, haloed by orange light. _Surrender or sacrifice? Scapegoat or martyr?_

He likes none of those options.

It doesn't mean anything, anyway, he reminds himself. Just a card, randomly assigned. It’s not as if tarot cards really tell the future, and besides, the whole tarot thing is just a quirk of Arcana’s design, an aesthetic for its 22-card system. It doesn't _have_ to mean anything. The game doesn't know who he is, so it can’t possibly have chosen a card specially tailored to him. They can't possibly _know_ about his father, about the car, about the space between the slip of a tire and the voice of a EMT, here to help here to help here to—

He’s just disappointed, and probably that’s why he feels so on edge — he’d like to have gotten something cool instead of vaguely menacing, like Strength, or The Magician, or Justice, or something. What could be more unfortunate than a hanged man? At the very least, he’s thankful he didn’t get Death or The Fool.

“Which card is it?” Raven asks, coming up behind him and snickering when he quickly hides his card from view. “Good boy. Better that nobody knows. You don’t know what cards your enemies are missing — and in this game, everybody’s your enemy.”

“That’s cheery,” Murphy says.

“That’s the game,” Raven replies, mildly.

“The game that you program?” He slips the card into his jacket pocket. “Why are you working with Monty and Jasper anyway, if you’re sabotaging your own creation? Is it some kind of quality control thing, or do you genuinely believe in whatever it is that they’re doing?”

Raven sighs. “I didn’t create Arcana. This technology has so much potential, and the only thing the government allow us to do with it is make a stupid video game. It's all bread and circuses, anyway, a distraction from what they're really up to.”

“Which is?”

“Surveillance, advertisement, control, whatever you want,” Raven says, shortly. “Everyone knows that. But people don’t care, not when they’re being entertained. And worse, you know. There are whispers…”

“Whispers?” Murphy says, sceptical. A fool could tell you that the government were surveilling them through the chips; Murphy doesn’t much care. He’s a twenty-three year old high school dropout working in construction; he’s pretty sure he’s not on the government’s radar. Besides, even if he were, it’s not as if he’s got much to hide.

A drop of water from the beam overhead plops onto his shoulder; he ducks out of the way of the next.

“Feels real, doesn't it?” Raven asks him, seemingly changing the subject. “That’s what I've been working on, mostly. Making it feel as authentic as possible — creating the perfect simulation of reality.”

“Do you take constructive criticism?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m sure you’re going to offer it regardless.”

“Lay off on putting people in the cards. It’s creepy.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. John Murphy, creeped out by a tarot card.”

He stares at her. “How do you know my name?”

For the first time, she looks sympathetic. “Murphy — you prefer Murphy, right? — I know pretty much everything about you, and anything I don’t know, I can find out. You’ve _uploaded_. Every memory, every thought, every feeling — it’s all in the cloud now. The game knows everything there is to know about you. It could replicate you down to the last hair.”

“That’s even creepier.” Then, he thinks about all the drunk texts he’s sent Emori over the past three months — _worse_ , his memories of sleeping with her — his more unfortunate teenage haircuts — that time he fainted when they were dissecting frogs in middle school biology — all there to be viewed by a bunch of computer nerds and government goons. He shudders. “Wait — everything? That seems kind of immoral.”

“I’m not a freak. I know how to apply discretion, Murphy.”

Murphy was not reassured. “Still, won’t that mean that the game knows I’m the Trojan horse?”

She scrunches her nose. “Not exactly. Being a programmer comes with some perks, and I’m the best at what I do. Anyway, even if I hadn’t created the malware, it would take them about a million years to go through all the information in the cloud. Human beings are complicated and illogical. Just because the game has the info, doesn’t mean it knows how to read it, or what to do with it. I mean, don’t _advertise_ the fact you’re carrying the glitch, but this isn’t _1984._ Thoughtcrime is pretty damn hard to prove, and even harder to persecute.”

“Very comforting, Raven, thank you.”

She flashes a grin at him. “You’ve decided?”

“Have you made death feel as authentic as possible as well?”

“I think you already know the answer to that. What’s the fun of a death game if there aren’t any stakes?”

He blows out a long breath, puffing out his cheeks. He could offer constructive criticism on that, too, but he doesn't think Raven will care to listen. “Then I’ll play, I guess. Not as if I have any other choice.”

Her grin fades, and suddenly, she’s all business. “You know anything about current City of Light politics?”

He raises an eyebrow at her.

“Of course you don’t. Well, Arcana is not a team game, clearly, since the whole point is to kill the other player and claim their card. But truthfully, the lone wolves rarely survive. There have been a few, obviously, but they’re exceptional players.”

“Who says I won’t be an exceptional player?”

This time, Raven’s the one who raises her eyebrow. Murphy concedes her point with a wave of his hand.

Smirking a little, Raven continues: “I know better than anyone the sort of people who win and the sort of people who lose, Murphy. There are generally a couple of gangs at any one time — people who have decided it's in their best interests to stick together for a while. Usually, gangs don't last long without one person killing another, but there’s one group that has stayed fairly solid these past couple of months. This one is headed by a guy called Bellamy Blake. Incredible player — could have won six months ago, but I guess he’s bored or something, because he’s stuck around.”

Murphy doesn’t know what brand of boredom would possess a person to hang around in a game where everyone is out to kill them, but he decides not to question it. “You want me to join his little gang, then?”

“He’s known for taking newbies under his wing,” Raven explains. “Newbies that pass his challenge, that is.”

“Challenge?” Murphy crosses his arms over his chest. He’d forgotten about the challenges — death games they introduced to Arcana in order to spice up the game.

“It’s usually not that hard. You’ll probably pass.”

Murphy scowls at her, even though she’s already proved herself immune to his nastiest looks. “Where can I find him?”

“There’s a warehouse loft in the Gasworks, which is the industrial area by the quays, just north of downtown,” Raven tells him. “That’s where you’ll find Bellamy. Here’s your phone — the location is easy to check on the Maps app. Keep a hold of it, as you only get one, but there’s no real danger of somebody stealing it, since it’ll only work for you.” She hands him a standard-looking black smartphone, not unlike his own at home, but with no camera and much fewer apps. It lights up the minute he touches it. He sees icons for Maps, Health, Tips, Stats, Cards, and nothing else.

“Do I get a weapon?” he asks her.

She laughs, humourlessly. “Look around. Improvise. The whole point of the game is to be as realistic as possible.”

He stands his ground. “It’s a parking lot, Raven. There isn’t a lot I can improvise with. You’re sure you can’t code up your dear friend, ally and virus horse a gun?”

She gives him a gentle shove. “If you turn out to be useless enough to die between here and the Gasworks, Murphy, I doubt a gun would have helped you anyway.”

“You say the nicest things.”

She snorts. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, but as a programmer, I won’t be able to interfere. I have an alibi to maintain. Once you leave the parking lot, you’re on your own.”

 _I’m always on my own,_ Murphy almost replies, but stops himself at the last minute. It feels too honest; too true a thing to admit out loud where somebody else could hear him. “Fine,” is all he ends up saying.

Something about Raven softens. She takes a step back, and seems to flicker in the dim shadows of the parking lot, as if she’s already little more than a phantom. He supposes they’re all phantoms now; a host of phantoms in an electric city. “Good luck, Murphy.”

Then, between one blink and the next, Raven is gone.

Murphy stands alone in the darkening parking lot, with only the faint sounds of traffic and the _drip-drip-drip_ of the leaking ceiling for company.

_—01000100100110—_

Despite the very helpful Maps app installed on the phone that seems never to run out of battery, Murphy gets himself hopelessly lost on the way to the Gasworks. He ducks under an awning somewhere east of the business district to take shelter from the rain, to gather his thoughts. He imagines what he’s experiencing must be pretty similar to how a caveman would react if you brought him into a supermarket; his whole mind is reeling, stuffed, fed more information than it knows quite what to do with. He’s half tempted to hide away in another dark parking lot to recover his wits before he strips half-naked and starts babbling in syllables to bus stop advertisements. Even here, just shy of the hubbub of the city centre, he’s surrounded by sight and sound, and longing to retreat to somewhere with the space to allow him to process it.

It all feels a little too real, he thinks — eerily, uncannily accurate, from the dampness that leached into the very air in the abandoned carpark, to the cracks in the ceiling of the stairwell and the rust on the banister railing, to the squeak and weight of the door as he pushed it open and stepped out onto a shadowy alleyway. He met no one on his way out of the multi-storey parking lot, which was a relief, because the only thing reminiscent of a weapon he’s found is a jagged and bent piece of scrap metal someone jammed behind a radiator in the stairwell. He hid it in his jacket pocket, within easy reach if he needs it, and tries not to wince whenever the sharp end bumps into his side.

In contrast to the vacant parking lot and deserted alley, downtown is a tangled, writhing place. Tall buildings hem in the inhabitants of the city; manmade mountains of glass and steel have been carved with deep gorges for streets, the city labyrinthine even in its gridded uniformity. Puddles seethe red and blue and green on the sidewalk. Passing through the city centre, Murphy felt half-swallowed by it all; the neon glare of signs, damp smog and street food, faceless suited people hurrying under a darkening sky, ducking out of the way of umbrella teeth. Even here, under his awning, out of the warpath of commuters, he feels harried and hunted and unable to relax. The City of Light is at least as big as Polis, and supposedly just as populated, though 96% of that population are the programmed pixels of NPC’s; Murphy thinks it feels much bigger, even if the bulk of its inhabitants are controlled by code and computers.

He’s heard plenty of stories — most likely urban myths — of people who went crazy playing Arcana, and stopped being able to tell what was real life and what was the game. They'd been dragged off to madhouses until they stopped believing that everyone was out to get them for a tarot card they'd worried all the ink off between their hands — or worse, knowing death was the only way out, taken an ill-advised shortcut. Or, at least, Murphy hopes they're urban myths. There had been a teenager all over the news a couple months ago who tried to stab his maths teacher, claiming he thought he was in the City of Light, that he was just playing the game — though, in his less generous moments, Murphy had personally figured the kid probably just got sick of algebra. There had been calls to have Arcana banned after that, but they fell on deaf ears. As far as Murphy’s aware, all the government did was raise the age restriction from 16 to 18.

Now, though, he can see how it happens. If he wasn’t able to keenly remember the sequence of events that landed him in the game, he’d have plenty of trouble distinguishing it from reality, too. He wants a cigarette, but he doesn’t _crave_ one; he’s just desperate for something to do with his hands. Reaching into his jacket pockets on the off-chance a packet has magically materialised there, his fingers close instead on the makeshift knife, and the hard edge of his Arcana card.

He leans back against the wall for a moment, noting the way his breath clouds out before him, trying to dispel the memory of his own serene expression in the card, serene even as he was suspended upside down. Rainwater drips down his temple, tickling the red tip of his nose; his hair is soaked, flattened to his scalp with wet; still, he thinks about the hanged man in the card. Surrender and sacrifice; scapegoats and martyrs. Seatbelt cutting into his neck. If he takes out his card now, will the words have changed? A part of him wants to check; the same part of him that lurks on Emori’s social media accounts and picks at half-healed scabs.

It’s easy to forget, in the overwhelming _busyness_ of the City of Light, that he’s here for a reason. That, while ninety-six percent of people he sees are mindless apparitions conjured up by the game, the other four percent are here to kill him. That the hanged man that haunts him is the same hanged man that’ll round out the end of another player’s card collection; that’ll bring them one step closer to victory. 21 kills and 22 cards: all it takes to win.

Murphy takes out his phone.

A part of him bristles at the idea of following Raven’s instructions and finding Bellamy Blake. He never asked to be uploaded to the City, and playing along feels like giving in. Like—

Like surrender.

Maybe he won’t find Bellamy Blake. Maybe he’ll ignore Raven’s advice, go his own way, forge his own path. Maybe he can win that way. Murphy’s managed fine on his own for over ten years — the disastrous end to his relationship with Emori is damning proof of that. He couldn’t handle _not_ being alone, not for long. Couldn’t handle being loved, couldn’t handle a lack of conflict so endeavoured to create it, etc., etc., etc. — or whatever the hell she had said when she stormed out of his apartment for the last time.

 _But_ _maybe going solo is the thing that’ll get you killed_ , a small voice at the back of his head says. _Raven, for whatever reason, wants you to win. Maybe you should listen to her._

Raindrops are fringed with a spectrum of colour where they land on the phone screen, distorting the pixels within pixels, refracting and multiplying the red arrow that points in the direction Murphy has to go; the direction of the enigmatic Bellamy Blake and his loft. It is a perfect replica of the hundred other times Murphy has tried to use his phone in the rain, the touchscreen cold and unresponsive, water warping the picture. He wipes the wet screen on the back of his jeans before slipping it back into his pocket. The battery never drains, and the rainwater isn’t breaking it; the illusion of reality faltering only when it needs to, only when reality might be inconvenient. His breath puffs out before him like smoke, mingling with the damp smell of rain and car exhaust.

Gasworks are northwest of here. He isn’t far.

Murphy sniffs, gathers his damp jacket closer around his shoulders, and steps out from under his sheltered awning. Not because because he’s decided to trust Raven or anything. Not because he doesn’t really see any other option.

No, he tells himself, he’s just got nothing better to do

By the time he finds his way to the Gasworks, night has fallen fully. Going by his phone, it’s around 7pm, but Murphy doesn’t feel tired. He wonders how much time has passed in “the real world”; whether his body has just lain there, slumped over on his apartment floor, for hours on end. It won’t do him much good to dwell on it, so he doesn’t — but the worry still lingers at the back of his mind, slotting in alongside the need to constantly remind himself that none of this is real.

Bellamy Blake’s loft is obvious. It’s the biggest building in the Gasworks — a haphazard district overlooking the dark waters of the quays, thick with the smell of petrol, laughably industrial, with every building veined with brass pipes thick enough for a grown man to hide in, occasionally spouting puffs of piping-hot steam. The entire district seems to breathe, inhaling fuel and exhaling steam, like some sick sort of steampunk organism, half-sunken into the water, amphibious and hungry.

The loft is on the water’s edge, parts jutting out precariously over the black water. It’s a red-brick building, like one of the factories Murphy’s seen in old movies, each curved window on the lower level reflecting nothing but the distant orange glare of downtown. On the top floor, however, Murphy can see glimmering lights through the glass; a shadowy figure paces on a balcony overhead, and snatches of voices join the lapping of water on the edge of his hearing.

Murphy only passed a couple people on his way here. A hooded guy smoking what smelled like a joint against a wall; a drunk couple mid-argument, teetering far too close to the drop into the canal; a harried-looking blonde girl who barely spared him a glance. He kept his hands in his pockets, fist curled around his makeshift knife, but nobody looked twice at him. It all feels like it’s been too easy. The rules of Arcana are straightforward. Kill other players, claim their card, collect the entire 22-card Major Arcana deck to win. Pass Go, collect 210,000 dollars, the sum total of every kill's 10,000 dollar entrance fee. Personally, Murphy finds it deeply unsettling that nobody’s tried to kill him yet, but maybe he’s just a pessimist.

When he rounds the corner of the defunct factory, however, he immediately spots a group of two loitering at a door — a backdoor, by the looks of it, one of those small staff doors tucked away in a corner, a far cry from the wide double doors of the factory’s main entrance. Murphy banishes his nerves. Over two years in a junior management position in a job he loathes with people he detests has taught him the fine art of looking like the sort of person nobody will ask anything from, Jasper Jordan’s immunity notwithstanding. He glowers the whole way to the door.

“Good,” says one of the people there when he sees Murphy approach, a man with dark hair and liquid eyes who leans against the service door, and Murphy conceals his alarm at the sight of the guy’s gun, tucked into the holster at his belt. “We got enough for the challenge. You’re in luck, kid.”

The “kid” in question is skinny, probably barely eighteen, and kind of goofy-looking. Trepidation wars with excitement on his features.

“Or at least, I assume you’re here for the challenge?” The guy with the gun looks Murphy up and down, mouth curling a little. Murphy doesn’t know if it’s in derision or respect. When Murphy nods, he extends a hand. “I’m Atom. I work for Bellamy, if it wasn’t already obvious.”

“And I’m Myles,” the eighteen-year-old offers.

“Murphy.”

“The challenge is simple,” Atom continues. “I show you in. You find your own way out.”

“Do we work together, or what?” Myles asks. “Why did you need two players? What sort of challenge is it?”

Atom just smirks, opens the service door, and gestures for them to enter. The doorway is pitch-black; Murphy can’t see a thing past the narrow triangle of light cast on the floor from the streetlamp at his back. A distant whistle rises from one of the steam-pipes nearby. Myles swallows, nervous, glancing at Murphy, as if trying to gauge if he’ll go first.

Murphy glares back, and without a backward glance, steps into the dark, hoping that he looks much braver than he feels. He hears, rather than sees, Myles follow just a step behind.

The darkness of the room is absolute, oppressive as a physical pressure on his eyes.

“A tip,” Atom says from behind them. “ _Look down._ Good luck, and as always, may the best player win.”

The door swings shut, and the lights turn on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> world building ????? never heard of it
> 
> thank u so much for reading... even if all it is is one giant info dump... hope it all made sense... very very aware that this fic is my weird frankenstein's monster baby so i truly appreciate it. as per usual i have no posting schedule only chaos, and the chapter count is liable to change bc i am liable to be me. extra thanks to all the very kind and patient people to whom i have wept in the dm's over this, u know who u are and i love u
> 
> i am on twitter @ oogaboogu where i terrorise mutuals with my various bad opinions. hope that wherever u are u can stay safe in these *sigh* unprecedented times


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